BIRTH STORY: Meet baby Freddie

I've been meaning to email you for a while now, but as you can imagine I've been a bit tied up with a newborn!

Our gorgeous little Freddie (Wilfred James) arrived in the morning on Sunday 17th September, 10 days post EDD! I was fortunate enough to go into spontaneous labour (yay!) and the birth was a positive experience but as with most births, didn't go exactly to plan!

My waters broke at about 8pm on the Saturday night, with contractions starting about 15-20 mins later. They were pretty regular (5 mins apart) and about a minute in duration from the beginning so I ended up riding it out at home for a few hours until they were much more intense and about 3-4 mins apart, and arrived at the Wesley just before midnight. 

Around 3-4 am, I started getting very strong urges to push (2-3 per contraction), but it didn't feel like it was actually moving the baby. Over the next hour or so, they checked my dilation and I was close to fully dilated but with an inflamed cervical lip. They couldn't slip the lip over the baby's head, and the pushing urge pain was becoming quite unbearable for some reason so I ended up needing an epidural to allow the inflammation to go down. This reduced the pushing urge pain a lot, but meant I had limited movement and while I could feel the sensation of the contractions, they were nowhere near as strong, so my pushing was not particularly efficient. I ended up having quite a long second stage (starting from around 7:30am), with Freddie being born with the help of suction at 10:30am. I was very relieved to have him out, and for it not to have had to go to forceps or C-section. My actual OB had the weekend off, so ended up with another OB from the same practice, who was really good. 

A huge thank you to you for the fantastic workshop and active birth yoga classes! I really loved going to them and found them invaluable for preparation. They definitely helped me go into the birth feeling confident and well informed to make decisions along the way, even when things didn't go to "plan". I especially remember hearing another girl who came in to tell her birth story a few weeks before I had Freddie, and she had a similar experience with an inflamed cervix leading to an epidural, so I felt quite informed of the situation when it happened to me.

Georgina attended our Active Birth Yoga classes and Active Birth Workshop.